Cia

Who is Dar Adal? Just as Abu Nazir has begun shift from specter to physical character, "Homeland" has brought in a new, mysterious overlord to lurk in the shadows. This time it's in the form of a powerful intelligence official revealed to be secretly calling the shots over a CIA investigation into an impending terrorist attack. This man, this "Dar Adal," nearly has Brody killed. The only thing that saves the congressman is the failure of an operation to knock off Abu Nazir.

Susan Reimer 's column, "Surprising reaction to L'affaire Petraeus," (Nov. 15), brings up a number of salient points, most notably that male readers in large part thought that Gen. David Petraeus took the honorable, necessary course of action, while women who responded pointed out that chief executives of the past often had affairs but managed to carry out their duties. Ms. Reimer sums up her readers' feelings on General Petraeus and his philandering with the following: "With all due respect ... that has nothing to do with my oath of office, and it's none of your business.

Like a set of Russian dolls, in which each doll contains a slightly smaller version of itself hidden inside, the sex scandal that forced CIA Director David Petraeus from office last week seems full of secret compartments that have yet to be revealed. Since Friday, we've been deluged with tantalizing details about the affair between Mr. Petraeus, 60, and Paula Broadwell, 40, a former Army officer and married mother of two who published a fawning biography of him this year. But there are still too many pieces of this puzzle that just don't seem to fit. Initial reports indicated that Mr. Petraeus had stepped down after FBI investigators uncovered the relationship between him and Ms. Broadwell while pursuing a complaint about harassing emails sent anonymously to a another woman, Jill Kelley, who was described as a friend of Mr. Petraeus and his wife.

We need to learn to get past these bimbo eruptions. Because if we don't find a way to forgive and move forward, a lot of good people are going to end up on the scrapheap. Gen. David Petraeus is the latest. Perhaps the most brilliant and successful soldier-scholar of his generation, who was remaking the Central Intelligence Agency to face insurgencies and China, resigned last week, admitting he had had an extra-marital affair. An FBI investigation into complaints from a woman that Gen. Petraeus' comely biographer, Paula Broadwell, was threatening her brought to light steamy e mails between the general and his acolyte, herself a West Point graduate who never disguised her adoration for him as a leader and a man. (News reports have has since identified the woman who received the harassing emails as 37-year-old Jill Kelley, a State Department's liaison to the military's Joint Special Operations Command in Tampa.)

Here's a tweet from @AP:  AP PHOTO: Petraeus biographer Broadwell, whom FBI probe finds carried on affair with CIA chief, officials say Whom , of course, should be who ; the pronoun is the subject of the clause in which carried on  is the phrasal verb: "FBI probe finds [that] she carried on an affair with CIA chief," to use the old reliable pronoun-substitution method of working the syntax out.  Sentences like this with interpolated attribution and and understood that  are often the occasion for journalists, and civilians as well, to mistake a subject for an object.

Sure, her official position is hazy -- and she might not even be getting paid, but Carrie Mathison is back at the CIA. And so are bunch of video screens fixed on Nicholas Brody. The recursive storylines that defined Homeland's first season were back in a big way in Episode 4 of Season 2, as Carrie returns to work on a top-secret surveillance team monitoring Brody. As the show's perspective switches between the two characters, we again see Carrie's life being defined by the Brody she sees and hears on screen.

The report from the State Department was brief: Thomas M. Jennings Jr., a federal worker from Burtonsville on a temporary assignment with NATO peacekeepers, had died in a car crash in Southern Bosnia. Fifteen years later, it turns out that was only part of the story. Unknown to neighbors and friends, Jennings was working for the CIA, the agency acknowledged last week. A veteran covert officer — he told acquaintances he worked for the State Department — he volunteered to go to Sarajevo after the Bosnian war as a U.S.-led force worked to maintain peace.

Those sultans of style at al-Qaidahave released their line of lingerie for spring, and it's a blast. Tucked away in their secret atelier in Yemen, the fanatics of fashion have come up with an updated version of the exploding underwear that caused such a stir on Christmas Day 2009 when a hapless African lad tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit and only managed to severely singe his private parts. Al-Qaidabomb maker Ibrahim Hassan Asiri is reputed to be the designer of the new nasty knickers.